Dr. Conor Brady, Nick, and Bren discuss Mycobacterium and tuberculosis in animals and humans. They cover TB eradication programs, badger culling versus vaccination, why BCG vaccine protection wanes, and emerging treatments like Mycobacterium vaccae and Immodulon.
Chapters
It's the latest thing that I've got.
For those on podcast, when Nick gets excited, the screen bursts into fireworks.
I think it reads hand gestures.
Oh, is that right?
No, it doesn't.
It's random.
For those people on podcast, he just raised two fingers to the lens. However, you can guess which way around they were.
Do you like my lighting tonight, guys? Look how orangey it is.
Are you backwards though, Brady? Are you backwards?
Lovely.
You always say that. How do you know which way?
Your window is usually on the other side.
There you go. Okay.
There you go.
That is much more correct.
Your certificates are in the right place now.
I've moved them out of the way. They were too much like, I've got certificates and you guys don't have them up on your walls. And if you did, you'd have loads. So it's like, okay. Connor, move your shirts. Anyway, I don't know if I gave enough attention to this little device, guys. For those listening on podcast, I am about to hold up— oh, it's hot— I bought myself a cup of coffee, a tiny little hot plate. It's tiny, right? And it's chargeable.
Nick needs that right now. He's rather cold in his room.
Yeah, I'll sit on it.
Yeah, I swear to God, it's a little hot plate that holds like a large mug, right? And so, you know, the way you're working away, especially if you're doing laptops, so if you're doing anything, I mean, nurses are always talking about reheating their coffee 7 times. But now my coffee stays at exactly 78 degrees Celsius, which turns out is the temperature is— it's okay. But yeah, so I can just lift up my cup and it's always the right temperature. It cost me €15. I mean, it's changed my life. And you can heat up the dog's bowl in wintertime. So at breakfast time, you can— if you had one of these downstairs, I took it, it was for a dog, you know, I actually use it. But you could have it downstairs and you could heat the dog's breakfast if you wanted to. It could just be steaming.
Yeah, but you know what, I'm so OCD, I like sliding down that temperature gradient and hitting it just as it gets to the perfect temperature, and then you drink it fairly quickly then. It's always too hot and afterwards it's too cold, but you get to that sweet spot.
But now you have it at the sweet spot all the time. There's no need to panic and gulp it down like a weirdo. Now it just sits there, a large mug of coffee, and I don't have to change it halfway through.
Do you have a temperature setting that you can just change it to the right?
It comes with 3, it comes, it comes with 3, which I thought was a bit miserable, but, uh, it comes with, uh, 85, 80, 75, and then if you change the type of cup, it goes down to 65, 70. So for ceramic, it recommends 70, 78, I think is what that is.
I'd have bought it off, uh, some Chinese site like Temu, and it would have come with that would come with some setting like tepid, freezing cold, scalding hot.
Yeah, I hate a scalding hot cup of coffee. Who serves coffee scalding hot? Nobody wants a coffee boiling hot.
Has it got a 13 degrees temperature? I was just telling them guys that the house today for the whole day, which is why I'm wearing 20 layers, he says, holding up he's 20 layers for those listening on the podcast. And I was wearing a puffer jacket until we started. Yeah, like something from Back to the Future, before you say it.
And it looks like he's only got a couple of lights on for the camera and the rest is in darkness. You want to cut back? Is this the New Year thing?
Yeah, yeah, save electricity. No, I was just saying to them that the house has been at 13 degrees all day and so I've been absolutely freezing, apart from the room that the dogs are in, which is toasty because they're by the fire, which I have to go and then feed the fire every hour and a half just to keep them warm.
How nice is it that you have a log fire? You know, we're thinking about building a house in a while, and as we talked about our plans, you know, you can't have a chimney in Ireland, uh, certainly in many of the counties, and the county I'm in, you can't build a chimney, no more chimneys. And I thought, oh, okay, I'm getting very annoyed about this, and so I'll put in one of my log burners, like this I have a nice one they can control the oxygen to it, it's a fancy one. And he said, no, no to chimneys because you can't have an airtight house with a chimney. And I'm like, what? Who says I want an airtight house? I'll have a B-rated house instead of an A, I don't care. And he said, no, no, you can't have a chimney. All you can do is knock the house that we're— that's there is like, it needs to be knocked. And he goes, you have preserved the chimney, you're not allowed to move it, preserve the chimney and build your house around the chimney. That's what people— are you serious? That is what the Green Party's new idea, electric cars, which is complete Nonsense. Beef being the issue, complete nonsense. And now chimneys are definitely the problem. I'm like, oh my. And these things are so efficient, you know. So there's only one type of log burner you can have in Ireland, and it's completely sealed, and it's got a little tiny window so you can see the flame, but it's a big orthopedic-looking yoke in the middle of your house. So you can't have this lovely fireplace that you'll have some couches around. That's not on offer. You have to build that outside and have your couch outside on your porch. That's what the architect recommended to me. I said, a couch outside with a fire? I said, yeah, I live in Ireland.
That really sunny place.
I was so annoyed. I was so annoyed. Anyway, what can you do? Welcome everybody.
You've got the wrong coast for the sun going down, so you can't even sit out on your porch.
And I'm facing— the house is facing the wrong way currently, but we're set to change that. So it's all wrong. I'm going to take this earbud out. There's something wrong. My ears don't hold the earbuds, but mine don't either.
No, it's a sign of genius.
Ah, good.
Yeah, I can't stand those.
Oh yeah, the MacBook ones. No, the, the normal Mac and iPod ones. Oh, I can't.
Yeah, so one, one ear will— you— one ear will do. Guys, we are Raw Pet Medics. Um, you will catch us on patreon.com/rawpetmedics. Uh, thanks to all that are on there. We see you and we deeply appreciate you. Helps you— helps us keep the show on the road. So, uh, thanks to all. And you can get us on your podcast wherever you listen to that. We upload them every week. Pete, our sound guy, thank you for bearing with us. And so yes, that is what we're doing, and we are going to be talking about Mycobacterium tonight, which I have to admit was a new enough word to me until I saw something a few months ago. But it turns out Mycobacterium, one of the examples of that would be TB. So does anybody want to start us off? Bren, do you want to start us off a bit about, what do we start, how do we start off this conversation?
Oh wow, how about I'm going to start it with, with the story that I told last week. So sorry if anybody was here last week, because we— how did we get on to dairy cows? Were we talking about, uh, how they live?
Was talking about sleeping with goats, I think, was it? Oh, are you going to tell your sleeping with cow story?
No, no, no, that's for, that's for much, much later.
That would have been a good joke.
Okay, so So the story goes like this, that back in the old, in the old days, pre-industrial days, everybody lived in villages. And well, not everybody. There were cities, but they weren't that big. And you would have Farmer Giles down the road, or you'd have a cow in the back garden who would be exposed to sunlight and grass. And the cows had a relatively good life. And then with industrialization, people moved into the cities and they had to try and feed these, these people. And so milk was part of the diet. And so what they, what they thought is rather than bringing the milk 200 miles because it will degrade going into the city from, you know, mid Oxfordshire to get to Oxfordshire to London, it's going to take you a long time and your milk's going to go off. So what they said, I know, let's move the cows. So they moved the cows into the cities where they cooped them up in horrendous conditions and fed them on brewer's grains and other cheap fare that they could get in the city, because there's not a lot of pasture in the city last time I looked. And so the welfare and the innate health of these cows reduced And so they— and what happened is the cows, because their immune systems were poor and their general health was poor, they— where they may have been carrying TB before but not expressing it, they now started to express it and they were pumping out TB, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, into the milk. And it was giving lots of people in the cities tuberculosis. And which is what spurred Pasteur to come along and say, I know, I can pasteurize this milk to kill the Mycobacterium. Whereas in fact, the right answer would have been to get the cows out and bring the milk in on the new railways. Okay, but they didn't. They just said, right, let's pasteurize the milk. And that solved the problem without solving the problem. And from that day to this, we've been hothousing more or less, I mean, more or less our dairy cows. And they do get access, if they're lucky, to grass. Most of them do. But there is quite a lot of stress in the dairy industry and they get foot problems, they get a lot of mastitis. And so we haven't quite solved that. Let's have really happy cows producing happy milk. So that we can go back to raw, which is a very, very healthy commodity. That's the story that started us on this.
Talking about stress and milking, there was a really interesting— I went out to see a friend of ours who runs a local kennels in Cattery, and her husband does the new robotic milkers. So these allow cows to voluntarily go in to be milked. So that it reduces the stress. So they can be out on pasture, they walk in, they get milked. Obviously, it just effectively relieves them of having a heavy udder, and they literally volunteer. So some of them will go 4 times a day, some will go 3, some will go 2, and they literally just choose their own. And the The machines monitor who's coming back, so they work out how much to feed, what to feed. They're constantly monitoring health as they walk into the parlour. It's through the scanning and everything else. So really interesting changes in that. Yeah, AI milk indeed. AI and cows usually comes up with something totally different.
Yeah, I must be the last person to realize this, that Pasteurization is because of Pasteur. Oh God.
Really?
I knew Pasteur came up with that process. I knew if that was a table quiz question, I would have got that. But I never thought pasteurization, like you wouldn't call it Bradyization. I mean, it just sounds so confusing.
You would. Brady, you would.
I would actually, yeah.
When he was coming up with his product names earlier today.
So is that— is TB one of the diseases that we gave to cattle? Oh, consumption. Wasn't consumption— it wasn't that running through the UK at the time? Was not the big issue.
Okay, let's, let's talk about TB. So Mycobacterium, okay, is a bacterium which is found across all mammals, okay? It will affect all mammals. There are some specific bird types that can actually also affect people. There are some other bacterial infections of the chest. It will affect you in different ways depending on how you get it. So if you get it through breathing in exhaled and sputum aerosol bacteria, yes, you may get the chest version. However, if you consume it, through infected meat or infected milk, you will actually get an interesting lymphadenopathy, especially affecting the abdominal organs. And this creates horrible internal abscesses through the liver, spleen, lymph nodes of the gut. So through the Peyer's patches, etc. Not necessarily causing, you know, any typical lung pictures.
Are you saying it's the same bacteria that will give you two different types of pathologies depending on how you—
Yeah, depending on how it affects you. Yeah.
Wow.
So the one thing that the body does to try and fight the Mycobacterium is it walls it off. Okay, so the granulation that it creates around it, the purulent material effectively starts to calcify, becomes a caseous encasement, and the fibrous layer starts to wrap around it because the body isn't really able to truly destroy those bacterium. It can wall it off and it can often then sit quietly just there, seeming to be doing nothing until your immune system drops. And then you can get full-blown. So we're seeing a lot of people who have had TB coming in when they emigrate in. But if they get another disease which suppresses their immune system, then the NHS suddenly— they're taking X-rays now and all of a sudden they're getting re-emergence of TB. So things like HIV would be a classic to suppress the immune system. And that's when you can get suddenly expression of TB again.
So look, this is a hot potato, but I'm going to start— I'm going to throw this in straight away because it's a good time to do it as any. So Westerners, of 100 or 1,000 Westerners that walk around with TB, only 1 in 10 will show disease, will kick in with a disease. And the CDC states exactly what you state, so it's quite prevalent. You'll have tens of thousands of people walking around with this, uh, TB issue in them but not getting sick with it. And, uh, only 1 in 10 do. And they say that it's— it all comes down to terrain again, doesn't it? So if, if it's only 10% turn up with the disease, that does eerily remind me of the whole issue with the, with the poliovirus type thing, which now looking back we do know that it was most likely not virus-related because so many people came down with poliomyelitis without the virus. And then there was like 900 kids in Detroit that had poliomyelitis, not one had the virus. And, and it's why the vaccine— there's a question. The point was it takes a certain terrain. And at the time, for poliovirus, back in the day, it was all the heavy metals that were being used in fertilizer, the new thing, and as a weed killer particularly. And they started using a lot of weed killer, and this disease started kicking in in the towns that used the heavy metals. Listen, the book that you have to read, I've talked about it before, just— it's called The Moth and the Iron Lung. It's the best book you're going to read, short little book that explains this. The point was, it all came down to terrain. When these people were sick and properly with heavy metals, polio virus, yes, could get in, as could other things, because it would get in through the gut. So, uh, that was one thing. And where it got in was where the disease would get you the worst. So there was different types of poliomyelitis, and if it got into your stomach, was closer to your spine, so you'll get— anyway, it explained it all wonderfully. So coming back to the TB thing, If only 1 in 10 come down with the disease, the CDC highlighted 4 things that make you more likely to get TB, the disease, if you have TB. And the first one was HIV, which today is very, very manageable. And the other 3 were like very, very obvious, like malnutrition, which is, you know, if you're malnutrition, you're more likely to get the virus or the disease will kick in, which kind of makes sense. Diabetes, which at least is a discussion for another day maybe, and those who smoke. They're the top 4 people who kick in with, and I just thought, wow, so very, very manageable other issues that if you didn't do these things which are more likely to result in disease in your environment, then the disease doesn't kick in, which is just, uh, which is just interesting. It's just interesting that it's not like a natural-born killer.
So something that was really interesting, so we in the UK had a bit of an outbreak in pets, um, back in 2015 2015, I think it was that far back now.
And in, from Venice, you mean?
Yeah, well, we had an outbreak in cats. Sorry, I'm talking about in companion animals. And it was really interesting because a lot of work was done at Edinburgh University, and I had a chat to them about this particular outbreak. A particular type, uh, of, of TB which, um, actually could be found in the rodents and mice, rats, other mammals within many of the households where those cats were affected, but not all of them. That's why they identified it down to a common source of venison meat that they were being fed. But it could have been— and a lot of households, you know, that even the environmental health did a study to show that a lot of the households, the humans also had exposure to that TB, but as you say, had no clinical signs because they were otherwise okay, you know, they were fine because they didn't have immune suppression, etc.
What about vitamin D, guys? Because there's a whole thing about fresh air And when you get fresh air and you go to the mountains and what have you, you also get lots of sunlight. Yeah, because you know the treatment in the old days, you'd go up to a sanatorium in Switzerland or you'd go to the sea and what have you. What about vitamin D? Because we now know that it's just massive when it comes in terms of immunity against foreign invaders, uh, bacteria, viruses.
Something that I would just like to point out for that it was only these cats that were affected because there was a genetic trait towards them taking the bacteria and producing disease. So actually there were quite a lot of cats that wouldn't get disease even if you fed them it. And it was almost like the difference between cats that suffer from feline infectious peritonitis and get a wet FIP versus those that just get exposure to coronavirus and then just have a a very mild diarrhea and then get over it. It's almost that their immune system has been activated to almost receive and become an abnormal response which causes this abscessation within the gut lining, within the abdomen, you know, causing these other symptoms rather than necessary. And these cats were then not, you know, breathing out TB sputum or anything like that. It was just enclosed abscessation. So the risk in animals is that if they get TB, if those abscesses aren't picked up by the meat inspection and are consumed— and these can be, you know, really small abscessation— so if it goes into mincemeat or something like that and then is used in cooking, if it wasn't cooked properly, there's a risk that you would consume it and then get the TB from that meat. Or if you're feeding it raw to your pets, they obviously wouldn't be killed off by the heat process, therefore you'd be getting it. But it isn't every animal. They have to be predisposed to forming these abnormal abscesses.
So to marry up what Nick and myself are saying there and what you're saying is that certain animals are affected. Which begs the question, what is it about them that makes them susceptible to disease? So when Nick just— Nick says vitamin D, and you just go straight to— you go straight to Scholar, and it's just lots of very convincing studies about vitamin D. It's been reported that various factors may influence the incidence and progression of TB. The very first one they say is vitamin D deficiency, and there's 3 studies listed after them, and 2 of them are enormous. And it's like, wow. So something makes the— like, you use— you mentioned a genetic factor there, Well, is there environmental factors that make you more susceptible to, you know, the virus kicking in, which, which was the case?
That's epigenetics and where we start to get all of the extra stuff outside of that.
Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.
And then so, so absolutely. So vitamin D and that, that's actually something that was raised, a really interesting point because you talked about Angus Dalgliesh, Prof. Angus Dalgliesh, who was looking at a vaccine for melanoma.
I've got some interesting stuff on, on, uh, Professor Angus Dalgleish. Now, uh, I think we, I think we all came across him on, uh, our friend John Campbell. Dr. John Campbell is, is a big noise on YouTube, and he's done 3 because he was so smitten with Dr. Angus Dalgleish, who's quite a guy actually. He's a character. And he did the first interview, what, about 3 months ago, maybe. And in very rapid time, he was back on. And, and Angus Douglish has got some interesting clinical information to share on the last 3 years because he's been looking at, at cancers and melanomas and infection. He was, he was a big pioneer in HIV.
Back in the day, 560 publications in melanoma alone. He's the melanoma guy. So when the guy speaks about melanoma cancer, you're talking to the most highest published scientist on the planet on the subject. Sorry, just to give some context.
No, it's fantastic. He's very, very, very well appointed. You know, he knows everybody and is, until recently, was thought very highly of. Okay, but that's another story. However, getting back to the Mycobacterium, so what he's got— I've got some notes here, I'm just going to look at those. So if you want to see this story, because I'm going to tell you some stuff which is really quite impactful, have a look at, uh, Dr. John Campbell, his channel on YouTube. Uh, I found it massively helpful over the last 3, 4 years. He's just a voice of, of No nonsense, great reason. And so you had Angus, Angus Dalglish, he's had him on 2 or 3 times, and they happened to get onto the subject of— they were talking about vaccination, and he said, and Angus Dalglish said, there's a very interesting thing, I've been using a Mycobacterium vaccae as a, as a T-cell booster with my melanoma patients. Yeah, these people have got melanoma, and that's bad news in many people, in humans, unfortunately. And he said it was remarkable because I was, I was— it's not a vaccine because it's, it's not— it doesn't alert the body to one protein, which is kind of the classic version of a, of a vaccine. It generally upregulates your T cells. Yeah, you've got your B cells which produce antibodies, you've got your T cells which are innate. They, they're kind of hand-to-hand fighting with, with infections and things like this. And he said that he was doing a trial for melanoma. It was going, going swimmingly on the back of another trial for pancreatic cancer, which also went amazingly with this Mycobacterium vaccae. I've put some information onto Patreon for people. And he said it was really remarkable. All my patients who were on the Mycobacterium vaccae shot for their melanoma— and these guys, they're ill and they're kind of 60s, 70s, maybe even 80s— none of them got COVID. And if they did, they had a snivel for a day or two and then they came sailing out the other end. So he thought, this is very interesting. Have we got a generalized improvement in immune function, primarily natural killer cells, T cells, T cell activation. And he thought, this is amazing. This is one jab which seems— early days— seems to have a protective effect against pancreatic cancer, seems to have a protective effect against melanoma, And actually he went on to say, and they've produced this stuff called Immodulin, oh no, Immodulon, I-M-M-O-D-U-L-O-N, and you can find it immodulon.com. I put it into Patreon, and he says it is useful in very, very many cancers because it upregulates your T cells. And he said, well, what happens in humans is that when you get to about 55, your T-cell strength just declines, as does everything else. Let's face it. And, you know, I know because I've got over that threshold in a big way.
But everything's, everything's gone downhill.
And he says there is a correlation between your T-cells going down like this and cancer coming up like this. Everybody knows that the older you are, the more likely you are to get cancer. Unfortunately, my father died of cancer. So this is close to my heart. And he said pancreatic cancer, melanoma, lung cancer, ovarian cancer, all these things seem to, to, to respond very favorably to the use of this one-size-fits-all product, Imodulon. Okay. And it, because it upregulates your immune system, it seemed at the time to protect from COVID in these people who were doing the trial. Yes, fantastic. How amazing is that? And so what they've done, the Immodulon is, is Mycobacterium opulency, because Mycobacterium vaccae is a bit difficult to kind of put into production. And they found that Mycobacterium obuensi does just as well but is much more amenable to the process. And what they found is actually with the vaccae, if you give one shot, you get a great response. If you give two, you get an even better response. If you give three, the improvement falls off a cliff. But with the obuensi, what they did is they had to heat treat it. Yeah, the vaccae was And that's the difference between the BCG vaccine. BCG is attenuated live. That's right.
Yeah.
Whereas the adjuvants is heat treated. Yeah, they warm it up. So it kind of goes to sleep. And they can put that in and you can repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat the dose of this Imodulon. And you continue to get this T-cell response. So I'm not making any claims. I'm not saying this is the answer. I'm just saying this is very, very interesting from the top man in one of the very, very prevalent cancers in the UK. And if this rings any bells or chimes with you, then have a look at the John Campbell, Angus Dalgleish, have a look at the Modulon and do a little homework in that direction. I think it's It's very, very, very exciting for that.
I'd queue for that. I mean, when you hear the interview, the reason the guy fell out of favor slightly with his peers— not with us or anybody, many others— but, um, what Nick alluded to at the start, well, you know, it's just because, you know, the guy was involved then in some of the COVID stuff, and he said, look, I'm seeing a lot of cancer patients, and then he just has some thoughts on that, and but you're not allowed to have thoughts. So, uh, he— but the point was, he was saying that he was struggling to get this vaccine over the line. And, uh, just listen to the interviews of why he thinks that is. This is an incredibly effective— it's not even a vaccine, whatever. It's like, it's almost like an immune system.
It's an immune stimulant.
Yeah, it's just because it comes in a bloody syringe, it's so tempting to call it a vaccine. Yeah, but, um, but it's in this immune booster and it is highly effective. And he's struggling— this is the head guy in the, in his, in his field— and he's struggling to get these, uh, even the appropriate kind of studies over the line, stage 2 and clinical, stage 2 and 3 and stuff, to really prove to people that this is incredibly effective. For all cancers. And it's, uh, I just, I just get the darkness off that. I just go, oh, this is incredibly effective. This is something everybody would love a little shot of in September. And, uh, anyway, um, so yeah, check him out. It's very good. The BCG— you compare that to the BCG vaccine that's out at the moment, um, which has been around for about 100 years. Like, when people get TB, they pass it to each other. Correct me if I'm wrong, uh, you know, so if I guess if it came in through the lungs, you pass it via aerosol, which sounds like other diseases. But TB is just behind COVID for infectious killers in the world. It's the 13th biggest killer in the world, so it does lay people out, TB. And it's the second most infectious virus out there behind COVID, depending on, um, uh, where we are with COVID So, but the BCG— here's an analysis, here's the, the latest review on Scholar in 2022, BCG, a protective effect of this BCG vaccine up to 10 years following infant vaccination. Okay, so it lasts up to 10 years. And effectiveness up to 5 years is 17 to 86%. So like, when you've got an aerosol kind of spread, highly infectious disease, and the confidence intervals are 17 to 86% is the best you'll do, which gives an average of— which it doesn't sound like a straight average, but it is, you guys know how it works— is 66%. So 66% coverage from the BCG vaccine. So if you've got 10,000 kids 3,500 of them walking around not protected. Now for Eris, you know, so that is, that's, I just think, wow, I mean, there could be improvements made here is what I'm talking about. And you would hope that the BCG vaccine would be really effective to control things, uh, but I'm not quite sure how effective it is. But after 10 years, I mean, it plummets down to the, the figures plummet, and then reboosting with the, with the BCG vaccine, uh, is not recommended. So it's not— they don't do a second boost. You've got up to 10 years protection after 10 years. So there isn't something out there.
Um, this is what you were saying, it's, it's, it has a deleterious effect if you continue to vaccinate.
Okay, third one, third one.
So if you— yeah, if you, if you give one, you're okay. If you give the second as a boost, you may be all right. But if you give a third, then you just start to almost get adverse effects.
Yeah, which is what a lot of people were flagging 3 or 4 years ago. But now apparently you can just take 6, 7, 8 shots. It's great, you don't have to worry about it.
Yeah, BCG and other genetic vaccine, you know, genetic injections are pretty much about as different as they can get. Yeah, one's been around for 100 years and is a, just, you know, is a bacterial preparation of some sort, and the other one is ultra new and it relies on you know, spikes and things like that and mRNA, not just, you know, good old-fashioned cells in the vaccine.
I want to throw another hot potato at Bren here, okay, so Bren, so the control of TB, by any cattle farmers will tell you, it's a huge thing, okay, so Ireland spent about a billion pounds when they were spending pounds from the '50s to the '80s. For, for us, that would be an enormous amount of money. And we're going to spend a billion pounds— that's the plan— about a billion euro, uh, from '25 to '30. That's the plan to spend. And there's a big problem because the previous money, a lot of it would have came from the EU, and the EU are saying we're now, as of 2023, we're not funding any TB control, which is a big problem. Okay, so as of 2023, no more EU money, and a large chunk of the money was used. No point giving you the figures, it could be boring, but it's a lot of money that's used. I'll I'll give you the UK figures on TB and what it costs farmers, aside from the pure stress of it. The disease costs taxpayers in the UK more than £100 million each year, and 20,000 cows are prematurely slaughtered each year to try and control it. And, you know, people might kind of weep about that, but the fact is that the British did a great job getting salmonella out of their eggs, you know, so it is possible to do that in some— in a confined situation like a egg barn, or egg barn, chicken, you know, confined situation, perhaps killing flocks. There's an argument for it. But one of the ways they try to control TB, of course, is looking at the vectors and what spreads TB. And I'm going to bring up badgers just because everybody loves an old badger. And there's a piece in The Guardian there which I wouldn't use if I was caught short on toilet paper, but The Guardian here recently They did say, um, the badger culls are not the best way to cut bovine TB report fines. This Badger Trust, okay, so they're obviously on the side of the badger, but they spent 10 years looking at it, and, um, they said a review of the evidence by the Badger Trust comes up after 10 years of culling in England, which has killed 210,000 badgers in the last 10 years, costing £58 million without any significant ease in cattle TB. Can you— does anybody want that hot potato? Bren, where are we with—
I'd love it, but Bren, have a little go. I've done some homework on this one.
Yeah, I mean, look, you know, the issues around badger culling was that there are more than, as I said earlier, there are more than one wildlife vector for TB. So rats, mice, you know, any mammal, okay, birds, but you've got But the type of bacteria that they're particularly interested in for the Ambrovis is particularly also going to be in other mammals. So you will also find it in wild boar, you'll find it in deer. So this is something that's a little bit contrary to where Nick was saying. I guess that the cow sufferers, okay, that were probably, you know, issues when they came into London that actually had the problem. Yeah, we do see it in wildlife that aren't housed in big cities. So we are seeing there is other factors. There must be other factors. A lot of those other meats we've just got to be cautious of consuming for this day and age of us going out and enjoying wonderful meals cooked by Michelin star chefs where it's just so and it's almost raw. You've got to be sure about that provenance of meat, that it's been checked thoroughly before it's served up on your plate. And the same would say, you know, it's often down to the inspection that becomes the problem. But coming back to your point about badgers, as soon as you cull a badger, you create a hole in the environment for that particular species to be refilled. So actually, one of the consequences of culling badgers is you often will get an increased movement of badgers. And if you're doing that on the edges of a TB zone, what you'll end up doing is pulling those badgers with TB or other mammals with TB into the zone that you vacate of that particular mammal. So it actually has some consequences for movement of the disease around. I believe that Wales were doing a vaccine program to see if they could vaccinate badgers rather than cull them.
Oh yeah.
And that's something that has actually been more encouraging because it leaves the badgers in place to effectively— yeah, well, it stops the movement of other badgers into that land. Again, you've just got to be careful, I guess, about how much vaccine you give them, because you may deteriorate their health if you repeat vaccinate the same badgers over and over again.
Did it reduce TB to zero in that population, or does it—
I don't know what the outcomes of those have been because they've been very cagey about releasing all of that data, because obviously there was such a backlash on, um, can we vaccinate, can't we vaccinate. Because in the UK it's a notifiable disease, the argument had always been if they're positive on their tuberculin test, then they should be culled out of the national herd to stop perpetuation of disease. Now, we've been doing that for the best part of 50, 60 years, um, and we haven't managed to get rid of it in certain areas. However, Yorkshire, pretty much a TB-free zone unless somebody buys their cattle in the southwest and decides to drive them up the M6 and across the A66 and dump them in Thirsk. But ultimately, if you don't buy the disease in, Yorkshire, Northumberland, Scotland are effectively classed as TB-free.
I think Northern Ireland is fairly good with it because they're red hot on their testing, aren't they?
Ireland is the worst. Ireland is the worst in Europe, guys. I'm sorry to say.
Northern Ireland.
Ireland is Northern Ireland.
Yeah, Southern Ireland. Well, I mean, what— but how do they— it's not like the TB gonna respect the border, the invisible border. Hey guys, we're not crossing, we don't have our passports.
It all depends on— yeah, I mean, there are a couple of— and I'm not pointing fingers or saying anything— there was a couple of questions about how cattle movement was happening across the borders on close farms to the borders.
Back in the day, for sure.
Back in the day. And I'm not even saying whether that still happens or not, but that was always a concern. But away from the borders, then certainly where controls and culls were in, and it's a lot less easy to move things a fair distance, certainly by lorry. You know, it's all very easy to open a gate, isn't it? But it's not so easy to, you know, get away with transporting them by lorry without TB testing.
Okay, I've been looking on the Dorset Wildlife Trust site because they've got quite a lot of good information about badgers and cattle and TB and what have you, and their recommendations— what needs to happen? Number 1, accelerate progress on cattle vaccination for TB, which is very hot potato because it's notifiable and because if you're vaccinated, you may then be positive when your farm is tested, which they do on a regular basis. So that's one of their suggestions, to find some way to vaccinate them but not let them react when they're tested. Reduce cow-to-cow infections, because the thing is, there's this whole thing of, yes, badgers seem to seed TB in cows, but cows then take it and spread it between them by coughing over each other and spluttering and licking and what have you in really, really big way. So they are a major— so that the badgers might light the blue touch paper, but the cattle, you know, will spread it massively between them. And then they're saying ensure higher standards of biosecurity on farms. Well, yeah, obviously, but it's quite difficult to stop badgers coming in, you know, farmers and fences, that's, you know, their—
It's also the fact that the types of fodder that they're feeding, you know, coming to maize, rather than, you know, feeding them grass, you know, encourages badgers into the feed troughs to eat the maize. You know, it's not, you know, corn on the cob is quite nice for a badger, even if it's pickled, and they, you know, as a maize silage, whereas actually they wouldn't generally be, you know, foraging around normal cattle silage.
All the more reason to get pasture grazing.
It's pickled corn on the cob, that's what maize silage is.
Well, effectively it's the maize plant chopped up and turned into a pickled preservation, so fermented food.
Tough winter, bloody hell. What else have you got, Nick? Did you find it in your—
And the fourth one, fourth suggestion from our friends at Dorset Wildlife Trust is help to roll out badger vaccinations, which seems like quite a good idea.
Seems like a good idea to me.
Pretty difficult to do, but if, you know—
Well, it's trapping, vaccinating, release, isn't it? And the thing is, you've then got to mark that animal as it's been vaccinated. So there's unfortunately usually a way of doing that that some people don't like, which is, you know, a marker.
Tracker on his mobile.
No, yeah, right. That's a little NHS certificate, you can flash it. Flash it when he gets caught.
He can't get into the pubs. So how do they—
how do they go across the border? How do they label them, Bren?
Uh, so, um, they, they would— various things from notching the ear to, um, ear trims and things like that, just like they do with spay cats. So it is, uh, you know, it is, you know, some people would say that— is that a mutilation? Is that a marker? Do you, do you chip them? Do you, you know, if you're putting a chip in them, is that a better way to do it? But then you've got to find, you know, and scan the chip, you know, from that side of things. Is it a, uh, various things that they were, they were looking at.
Tags will come out pretty quick. They come out of calves.
You just have to do it to the poor old baby deer in Phoenix Park. Oh, I hated doing it. Bloody hell. Actually, I never actually physically had to do it myself, but I had to hold them. Oh my God. Yeah, a baby Bambi, 3 or 4 days old, getting a tag in her ear. Not nice.
But the whole thing, so with all of those other mammal species that could, you know, carry TB, badgers were particularly labelled because they felt they went into the feed troughs more. I mean, if they allowed those cattle out into fields, the cow transmission probably would be much less than if they were kept in sheds. There is this whole thing about, you know, there'd be far more of an uproar from the nation if, you know, people are out culling deer on the base— on the way that they were culling badgers, just because old Bambi, you know, that's what they see.
Badger doesn't have a Disney movie yet. So just before we finish here, I just want to put people's minds at ease. How does— so humans can catch TB pretty handy, okay? So it is possible for us. That's why we're so concerned about it. So it is possible. Tell us, answer some quick questions. 2 questions. Can you catch TB from your cat or dog? And second of all, how do raw dog food producers protect us from TB when they're serving us wild prey raw dog foods?
I would suggest it is very, very, very unlikely that you would catch it from your dog or cat, purely and simply because the type of TB that they'd end up with is usually through consumption And if they've consumed it, they would get an internal abscess. And unless you open that abscess up and then consume it or inhale it, then the likelihood of you picking up that bug is virtually nonexistent. And you're not going to eat your cat, let's face it. Or you shouldn't be eating your cat. Did you hear that China banned the farming of dogs for meat?
Great to hear.
Bloody hell, that's been banned. Yeah, so anyway, that's, um, so, so the consumption there is, is so unlikely that actually it's really not a problem. So then you're back to what do, uh, food companies, our pet food companies, do, especially in the raw market, to protect our pets from getting TB?
Let's do that on Patreon. Yeah, because that's quite a— that's— oh, that's a hanger, another very good hanger.
I've got a second hanger, I've got a second hanger before we jump over. Okay, I'm going to ask you guys when we jump over, what percentage of TB in the US is from beef, is linked to beef TB, it comes from cattle? What percentage of all the cases? So Scott's analysis invested— I'm not going to tell you— investigated all reported cases of TB in the United States from 2006 2013 and found bleep of all cases in this time period to be infected with bovine TB.
Oh, you're a tease, Conor. You're a tease. They love you for it.
Guys, let's also talk about raw milk. Conor, can you find any stats on how many people get any type of problem from raw milk? And we'll talk about it in Patreon.
Okay, I actually have a figure. Okay, good.
Great, cool.
That's where it all started, when we're talking about raw goat's milk.
Oh, is that— there you go, there you go. These things do the full circle, right? Good night, everybody. Thank you very much. It's been great to be here talking about mycobacteria, of which I didn't know very much until a few weeks ago. So that's— it's fascinating, it's brilliant, and it's very important, you know, it's It's one of the biggest diseases in the world. It affects, you know, badgers and cattle and cattle and badgers. Who knows who is infecting who? It's a real biggie. So that's fantastic. I've put that fascinating link onto Patreon, so that's there. So you've got that if anybody, you know, if that brings any bells— no, if that resonates, you've got family members who are in some situation. Then you— that's a, that's a link. No promises, but I, you know, I don't even know whether they, they're still producing the stuff or whether they— you can get on the trial or what have you. But there it is. That's, that's our gift to you this evening. We're going to go over to Patreon now. Thank you very, very much. Thank you to our Patreon supporters. Uh, this is for you.
Thank you.
Bye-bye, everyone.
